


Night Gallery

by White Aster (white_aster)



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Creepy, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-02
Updated: 2009-07-02
Packaged: 2017-10-13 00:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/130794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ciel walks the shadowed corridors day after day and occasionally finds more than he bargained for.</p>
<p>(Post-first anime, with attendant spoilers.  Not second anime compliant.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Gallery

**Author's Note:**

> [This fic is now available in Russian!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8305382) Thanks to de_maria_na for the translation!

The most annoying thing about being dead, Ciel has decided, is that his sense of time has been completely destroyed.

There is no longer the simple human routine of sleep and waking, food and work, relaxation and then more sleep. He never gets hungry or thirsty. He never tires, though he has discovered that he can sleep, after a fashion. He rests and time passes while he is unaware. Ciel does it often to stave off boredom, when he is tired of occupying himself by exploring his new surroundings and when his...owner...is not making demands of him.

It is, he thinks but will never admit upon pain of another death, not an entirely unpleasant afterlife. Certainly not the hell he probably deserves. He is not certain where he is, exactly, though Sebastian (and even now that Ciel knows his true name, he will forever be Sebastian in Ciel's mind) has said that they are in his own refuge between worlds. Said refuge is, to all appearances, an endless series of rooms, filled with candlelight and shadows. Ciel has taken to exploring them, for lack of anything else to do with his time. Empty and dust-ridden cellars lie next to richly-appointed sitting rooms. A conservatory filled with dark-leaved and somehow ominous plants sits across the hall from a well-stocked kitchen that would not have been out of place in the Phantomhive mansion. Dining rooms and bedrooms, washrooms and libraries, treasure rooms and trash rooms and laundry rooms and once, perhaps most inexplicably, a factory full of machinery powered and running at full, clanking speed to some unknown purpose.

None of the doors Ciel has tried have been locked. None of them have led outside of this mismatched hive. There are few windows, and what ones there are have deepest, opaque midnight pressed tight against the panes, obscuring the surroundings. If there are any surroundings.

Ciel has his own theories about exactly what this place is, culled from the oddities he finds here and there. A perfectly cleaned pyramid of skulls, tucked in a cupboard. A sword, the metal white and shining with a light that puts the fire it is hanging over to shame. Glittering jewels and disintegrating furs, books and blood-stained weapons, flowers and skeletons.

And, Ciel finds one day, a long portrait hall, filled with paintings. At one end the portraits are faded, most of them nothing but blank canvases or vague outlines of human-shaped figures. As Ciel walks down the hall, the paintings grow more vibrant, more visible, the clothing of the subjects more modern. Said subjects are young and old, male and female, beautiful and homely. Their clothing is ancient, then merely old-fashioned, then Victorian. Each portrait has a gem the size of a walnut set into its frame. Each gem is dark gray, dull, except for one portrait at the very end of the modernly-dressed wing. Ciel stops two paintings away from that last frame. Its gem is a shining, vibrant blue, casting a brilliant azure hue on everything around it.

Ciel stares at that gem for a short eternity. He finally turns and walks back the way he came. There is, he thinks, no reason for him to go look at that painting. He is fairly sure he knows already who it is of.

The gray gems glint at him in a stony procession as he passes.

Later, Sebastian comes to him, a knowing smile in his eyes, and asks if Ciel has found anything amusing that day. Ciel glares at him pointedly, and Sebastian laughs, reaching for him.

Even later still, more thoughtful than tired despite his owner's efforts, Ciel asks if Sebastian will forget him. "Of course," Sebastian replies immediately, fingertips sketching swirling, spiking patterns along Ciel's bare back. "Eventually. Even my memory is not infinite."

Ciel rests his head on his folded hands and closes his eyes. He would make a snide remark about finally finding something that Sebastian cannot do perfectly, but he is tired. "Good."

Sebastian laughs again, and the sound is like dark velvet and claws against his skin.


End file.
